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Hera, the Sphinx?

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Hera, the Sphinx? HERA, THE SPHINX? In a spirit of inquiry I invite your attention anew to one of the most familiar fragments of Greek sculpture, the face which has been called the face of the cult statue of Hera from her temple at Olympia ever since it was so identified by the excavators in 1870 (Plate XII, Figs. 1-3).' 1 propose to discuss this identification once more because I think that the statue of Hera was something quite different, and that there is another explanation of the fragment in question, at least as plausible as the interpretationas Hera. The block of limestone is 0.52 m. tall, and consists of a face with the left ear projecting at right angles, with a broken mass behind and below the ear. It has neatly worked curls across the forehead, a band over the hair, straight hair diverging from the crown of the head, and on the very center of the head, a kalathos. On the right side the face is preserved as far back as on the left but there is no ear on the right side. This curious asymmetry has never been explained, nor has there been a convincing explanation of the lump which appears at the base of the headdress on the same side as the ear, without there being any corresponding lump on the other side. As soon as this face was found it was claimed as the head of the cult statue from the temple of Hera for the following reasons: first, the head is too large to be any- thing but a goddess, and the appropriate goddess is Hera, who had a large, ancient and important temple on the grounds; second, the material, a limestone, is the same as the base in the temple on which a statue or statues stood; third, that the head was found not very far from the temple; fourth, that a limestone figure could not stand out-of-doors; fifth, and this is the important argument, that Pausanias decribed a "rude " statue of the seated Hera within the temple. But let us examine the text of Pausanias (V, 17, 1-4). The section opens with the statement that in the temple of Hera is a statue of Zeus, and that he stands beside the seated goddess, and that the workmanship of these statues is rude. Pausanias con- tinues with descriptions of statues of the Seasons and of Themis; of five Hesperides, made by Theokles; of Athena, made by Medon, and of Kore, Demeter, Apollo and Artemis; then of Leto, Tyche, Dionysos, and a winged Nike. He proceeds (Frazer's translation), " The images I have enumerated are of ivory and gold [ra pev 8r; KarEL- in Xeyl vaE(rtv EXEEcav^roKai Xpva-ov]. But afterwards they dedicated other images the Heraeum: Hermes bearing the babe Dionysus, a work of Praxiteles in stone; and a bronze Aphrodite. ... A gilded child, naked, is seated before the image of Aphro- 1 Ausgrabungen zu Olympia, IV, pp. 13 f., pis. XVI f.; Olyvlpia, Ergebnisse, III, pp. 1-4, pi. 1. American School of Classical Studies at Athens is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve, and extend access to Hesperia ® www.jstor.org 354 DOROTHY KENT HILL dite. Hither were brought from the so-called Philippeum other statues of gold and ivory: Eurydice, <wife of Aridaeus, and Olympias,wife of> Philip." (The restora- tions at the end were made by Buttmann.) Now an honest and fair reading of this passage demands that all the statues, including the Hera and unless specified to the contrary, were of gold and ivory. The Hermes, the Aphrodite and the child are care- fully singled out as of other material. There is one clear statement that the statues mentioned in the first part of the chapter are of goldgend and ivory, and toward the there is the return to the subject, in the mention of other statues in these materials. The implication is clearly that the Heraion was a sort of storehouse for statues in the fine expensive media, with only a few ordinary ones added. Apparently there are two reasons why this chapter has not been accepted at its face value by archaeologists. First, Pausanias elsewhere mentions some of the same statues in their first settings, with works which he specifies as of cedar wood. It there- fore has seemed that he meant that the pieces in the Heraion were also cedar. Let us read the passages. In VI, 19, 8, describing one of the treasuries of the Epidamnians he says, " It contains a representation of Atlas upholding the firmament, and another of Hercules and the apple-tree of the Hesperides, with the serpent coiled about the tree. These are also of cedar-wood and are works of Theocles, son of Hegylus. The Hesperides were removed by the Eleans, but were still to be seen in my time in the Heraeum." Of this group, Pausanias describes the male participant and the tree with the serpent as of cedar. But he does not say that the female figures in the group were of cedar. Nor does he give any explanation of the splitting of the group. But since he has previously told us that the Hesperides were of ivory and gold, he does not think it necessary to go into explanations here. Apparently they were moved because early chryselephantine figures were being collected in the Heraion. Farther along in the same chapter (VI, 19, 12), Pausanias says, " The people of Megara, near Attica, built a treasury, and dedicated offerings in it, consisting of small cedar-wood figures inlaid with gold, and representing Hercules' fight with Achelous. Here are represented Zeus, Dejanira, Achelous, and Hercules, and Ares who is helping Achelous. Also there was formerly an image of Athena, because she was an ally of Hercules: but this image now stands beside the Hesperides in the Heraeum. The treasury in Olympia was made by the Megarians years after the battle, but they must have had the votive offerings from of old, since they were made by the Lacedaemonian Dontas, a pupil of Dipoenus and Scyllis." Pausanias in this passage does not say that Athena was of cedar and gold, but he does imply it. In a few moments we shall see that this implication is not irreconcilable with his previous statement that Athena was of gold and ivory. When:I spoke of an honest and fair reading of Pausanias, I was not flattering a revolutionary reading of my own. Ovierbeckin his An4tikeSchriftquellen zur Ge- schichte der bildenden Kiinste, published in 1868, grouped the three passages from. HERA, THE SPHINX? 355 Pausanias which I have quoted under the heading, "Anfange der Goldelfenbein- bildnerei."2 He divided V, 17, 1-4, putting the section about the Hesperides under the artists Hegylos and Theokles, the rest of the section, everything from r'7 "Hpas 8E e(Trr Ev TO)vao to Era eV KKaTrELXEYLLevaE-'rrTv EXE'aavros Kat Xpv-cov, under Dontas and Dorykleidas (equating Medon and Dontas). If Overbeck read the Greek this way, it is certain that the Greek means that these statues were chryselephantine. Two years after the publication of his book, the stone head was found at Olympia and threw dust in the eyes of scholars. Is it unfair to suggest that the wish to have dis- covered the cult statue was father to the thought ? The second reason why Pausanias' statement in Book V, chapter 17, was not taken seriously from the time of the discoveries at Olympia until the present is that until recently it seemed absolutely impossible and absurd to all archaeologists. Who ever heard of any such number of chryselephantine statues, and such early ones, all in one place? Recently there was discovered at Delphi a cache of fragments of chryselephantine statues, three as large as life and one as early as the beginning of the sixth century B.C., showing that such works did exist and were kept together.3 The cache at Delphi was made by shovelling the contents of just such a museum as the Heraion into a trench in the ground, followTinga fire at the end of the fifth century B.C. These Delphi statutes explain Pausanias' apparent confusion. There is not much difference between these early chryselephantine statues made of wood with gold and ivory inlays and attachments and the cedar statues with gold inlays which he described. All were constructed in the same way. Some had much ivory, others less, still others none. The prettiest, the most spectacular, statues were moved to the Heraion although they belonged to groups, to stand beside the cult statue which had always been there. These had lots of gold and ivory, and Pausanias refers to them as made of these materials. The others which exposed more wood and had little or none of the precious materials were left in their original positions. He calls them cedar-wood, or cedar- wood inlaid with gold. Perhaps even if the pieces had not been found at Delphi one could have had an inkling of Pausanias' meaning from a sentence that comes in VI, 19, 10, between the references to the groups which were moved to the Heraion. He speaks of a statue of Dionysos with face, hands, and feet of ivory. He does not tell us what the other parts were. But does anyone doubt that they were of wood? Here we have another indica- tion that such statues existed, and an example of Pausanias' habit of mentioning only what he thinks interesting about a statue. He did not write for us, but for people who could see the originals.
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